So this is why I can’t sleep – the animals. It was the animals all along. Lions in the basement, vultures round the indoor pool, the hyena in the gift–wrapping room on the second floor. It’s crazy, that’s what it is. And all the while the water rising.
What are we going to feed them? How are we going to clean up after them? And when the waters recede – if they ever do – will Mac have the energy to start all over again?
I don’t know. But Andrea rolls over suddenly, her face right beside mine on the pillow, and in the watery light of dawn I watch her eyes flash open, dreaming eyes, the eyes that pull me down and into her inescapable arms. ‘Sleep well?’ she whispers.
I try to avoid perspective as much as possible. Perspective hurts. Live in the present, that’s what I say, one step at a time, and forget nostalgia, forget history, forget the sketchy chain of loss, attrition and disappointment that got you into bed last night and out of it this morning. It’s hard, though, when you’ve got Andrea Knowles Cotton Tierwater sitting at your elbow and sectioning your grapefruit for you because you can barely lift your arms your back hurts so much, and April Wind the toad worshipper mooning at you from across the table. And Mac. I’ve known him for ten years, ever since I got out of prison for the last and final time, and here he is skating through the door in a gauze mask that scares the living hell out of me. ‘Morning, morning, morning!’ he chimes, whirling round on the balls of his feet as if he’s onstage, the two bodyguards shadowing him with their big heads and sleepy eyes. One more shock: they’re wearing masks too.
I gape. I blink. I fish my glasses out of my shirt pocket. ‘All right,’ I say finally, ‘come on, Mac – what’s with the mask? And don’t tell me it’s the mucosa again, because I don’t want to hear it, not with the weather and the animals and all the rest of it, uh–uh, no way.’
Andrea’s out of her chair already, and screw the grapefruit, screw her ex–husband, nobody exists in the world but Mac. ‘It is, isn’t it? April and I were trying to tell Ty, but he wouldn’t listen. Go ahead, tell him, Mac –’
But let me back up a minute to give you a view of the scene unfolding here. Here’s Mac, worth I don’t know how many millions, fiftyish and lean to the point of being skinny, bandy–legged in a pair of black jeans, some sort of drum major’s jacket with gold piping over a black Barbecue You! tour T–shirt clinging to his emaciated torso, his face swallowed up in fedora, shades and mask; and here’s Andrea, worth nothing, a hot old lady in a print hippie dress that drops to the toes of her boots, striated bosom exposed, golden eyes agog, taking hold of Mac’s forearms in real earnest while the bodyguards shift uneasily from one cloddish foot to the other. And where are we? We’re in one of the three dining rooms in the mansion, this one called the Motown Room, perched high over the north wing, looking out the reinforced picture window to the roiling mess of the fladands beneath us. It’s still raining. And the wind is still cutting up.
‘I’ve got masks for everybody,’ Mac pipes, shrugging out of Andrea’s grip and waving a sheaf of them over his head, ‘so there’s no reason to get excited. Just a precaution, that’s all. Everybody’s my guest for as long as this keeps up, and don’t you worry, Mac’ll take care of you. We’ve got plenty of food and Al’s had the generator going ever since the power went out day before yesterday – ’
I’m on my feet and I’m angry and I don’t know why. ‘So what is this, “The Masque of the Red Death” or something? We all wore masks and kept strictly to ourselves the last time, remember, Mac? And it didn’t do Lori a whole lot of good, did it?’
‘That was then. We didn’t take it seriously at first. We fraternized. Let the maids go home every afternoon. The parties, remember the parties, Ty? But I got out of the Carolinas the minute I heard this time. Siege mentality, folks. And, really, I’m going to have to insist that everybody wear a mask till we hear different – if you want to stay here, you play by my rules. And Dr. Deepit says to stay inside because of the mosquitoes, the ones that carry the – what do they call it, Ty?’
‘Dengue fever. They call it dengue fever, and the mosquito that carries it is the Aedes aegypti, formerly known to occur only in the tropics. They call it bonebreak fever too, because your bones feel like they’re snapping in half when you’ve got it. But we can stay inside all we want – shit, we could go around day and night in beekeeper’s outfits – but what are we going to feed the animals, that’s what I want to know. Everything got washed away yesterday, and all of them except for the lions have had to go without.’
Andrea’s face is – joyful. Or nearly joyful. And April Wind, dressed in some sort of serape with a clay likeness of Chaac, the Aztec rain god, dangling on a suede cord from her throat, looks ecstatic too. It takes a minute, and then I understand – the storm is raging, the plague afoot, and they’re locked in with Maclovio Pulchris: mission accomplished.
I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. The mucosa is a nasty business all the way round, a sort of super–flu, spread by casual contact, that inflames the mucous membranes of the sex organs, the respiratory canal and the eye until they begin to hyperfunction and you literally drown in your own secretions. It’s painful. It’s lingering. And it’s not pretty.
‘It might surprise you to know, Ty Tierwater, that there’s meat in this house,’ Mac is saying, and he skates playfully across the room to pose beneath a rippling electronic portrait of Gladys Knight and the Pips, performing for the little audience gathered in the dining room. I’d describe his look as sly, but for the fact that he has no look at all – hat, shades and mask, that’s all I see.
‘Meat?’ April Wind is offended. ‘But you’re a vegetarian, aren’t you? You of all people – I mean, I’ve read all the bios and the magazines too, everything …’ She’s gaping up at him from a plate of chapatis, lime pickle and eggs–over–easy prepared by Mac’s invisible cook and served up silently by a masked Pakistani woman who disappeared the minute the plate hit the table. ‘You’re a vegetarian. I know you are.’
Andrea’s left in the middle of the enormous room, looking as if she’s been deserted on the dance floor between tunes. ‘He probably just keeps it for his guests, for the parties – Barbecue You? Bight? Isn’t that it, Mac?’
Mac. She met him two days ago – through me, because of me – and already it’s Mac this and Mac that and could I get you another soda, Mac, or peel you some grapes, and what do you think, Mac?
He’s smiling – I can tell because the corners of the gauze mask lift just under the plastic rims of the sunglasses, where the muscles of his fleshless cheeks would be. He’s looking at me – or at least his head is turned my way. ‘Come on, Ty, don’t be such a crank – come on, I’ll show you,’ and there’s movement now, Maclovio Pulchris, the ex—pop star who hasn’t had a hit in sixteen years sliding across the room on spring–loaded joints to take hold of my aching and angry arm, the two Als stirring and exchanging nervous glances over the dangerous proximity of their employer to another human being, Andrea closing fast and even April starting up from her congealed eggs. ‘Down in the basement, Ty – the east basement, locked off from those sweet tawny lions, and you know I love them, man, so don’t give me that look. Shit, I’ve got a whole meat locker full of stuff – steaks, rump roasts, strings of pork sausage, lamb chops, corn dogs, filet mignon, you name it. We could feed fifty lions!’
I’ve never believed in vegetarianism myself, except as an ecological principle – obviously, you can feed a whole lot more people on rice or grain than you can on a feed–intensive animal like a steer, and, further, as everyone alive today knows, it was McDonald’s and Burger King and their ilk that denuded the rain forests to provide range for yet more cows, but, still, I don’t make a religion of it. Meat isn’t the problem, people are. In prison, they gave us spaghetti with meat sauce, chili con carne, sloppy joes, that sort of thing, and I forked it up gladly and didn’t think twice about it. It’s a Darwinian world – kill or be killed, eat or be eaten – and I see no problem with
certain highly evolved apes cramming a little singed flesh between their jaws every now and again (if only there weren’t so many of us, but that’s another story). Besides, I didn’t really come to the environmental movement till Andrea got hold of me, and I’d gone through thirty–eight years as a carnivore to that point. Top of the food chain, oh, yes, indeed.
My daughter saw things differently.
It started when she was eleven. She came back from an outing in New York with Jane’s sister, Phyll, which I’d assumed would be a Radio City Music Hall/Museum of Natural History sort of thing, and announced to me that meat was murder. They hadn’t gone to the Hall of Mammals after all. No, Phyll had taken her to the Earth Day rally in Washington Square, where she’d been converted by a dreadlocked ascetic and a slide show depicting doe–eyed veal calves succumbing to the hammer and headless chickens having their guts mechanically extracted on a disassembly line. I’d had a catastrophic day at the office, my biggest tenant – a national drugstore chain, the anchor for the whole shopping center – threatening to relocate in the mall down the street, and I was sipping scotch to anaesthetize my nerves and defrosting a fat, dripping pair of porterhouse steaks for dinner. Sierra stood there in the kitchen, five feet nothing and eighty–eight pounds, lecturing me about the evils of meat, the potatoes dutifully baking, the frozen string beans in the pot and the steaks oozing blood on the drainboard. ‘That’s disgusting, Dad – it is. Look at that meat, all slimy and bloody. Some innocent cow had to die just so we could eat like pigs, don’t you realize that?’
I wasn’t humorless – or not entirely. But I’d had a rough day, I was a single parent and a cook of very limited resources. Meat was what we had, and meat was what we were going to eat. ‘What about last week?’ I said. ‘What about the Chicken McNuggets I get you every Saturday for lunch? What about Happy Meals?’
The kitchen we were standing in was a fifties kitchen, designed and built by my father after he’d finished the first seventy–five houses in the development. Things were breaking for him, and he spared no expense on the place, situating it on three acres at the very end of the road, with a big sloping lawn out front and an in–ground pool in back, then buffering the property with another hundred acres or so of swamps and briars and second–growth forest – the haunt of deer and opossum, toads, frogs, blacksnakes and the amateur biologist and budding woodsman who was his son. The kitchen, with its built–in oven and electric range, Formica counters and knotty–pine cabinets my mother insisted on painting white, had been the scene of any number of food rebellions in the past (macaroni and cheese particularly got to me, and wax beans – I couldn’t even chew, let alone digest them), but this was unique. This wasn’t simply a matter of taste – it was a philosophical challenge, and it struck at the heart of the regimen I’d been raised on.
Her gaze was unwavering. She was wearing shorts, high–tops and an oversized T–shirt Phyll had bought her (Lamb to the Slaughter? it asked, over the forlorn mug of a sheep). ‘I’ll never go to McDonald’s again,’ she said. ‘And I’m not eating school lunch either.’
I took a pull at my drink, the scotch swirling like smoke in a liquid sky. ‘What am I supposed to give you, then – lettuce sandwiches? mustard greens? celery sticks? bamboo shoots? You don’t even like vegetables. How can you be a vegetarian if you don’t like vegetables?’
She had nothing to say to this.
‘What about candy? You can eat candy, can’t you? I mean, candy’s a vegetable, isn’t it? Maybe we could base your whole diet around candy, you know, like eggs with fried Butterfingers for breakfast, peanut brickie and baked Mars Bars on rye for lunch with melted chocolate syrup and whipped cream on top? Or ice cream – what about ice cream?’
‘You’re making fun of me. I don’t like it when you make fun of me. I’m serious, Dad, you know, really serious. I’ll never eat one bite of meat again.’ She pointed a condemnatory finger at the steaks. ‘And I’m not eating that either.’
I could have handled it differently, could have humored her, could have applied the wisdom I’d gained from all the little alimentary confrontations I’d had with my mother when I was Sierra’s age, not to mention my father and his special brand of militant obtuseness. But I was in no mood. ‘You’ll eat it,’ I said, looming over her with my scotch and the beginnings of a headache, ‘or you’ll sit at that table over there till you die. Because I don’t care.’
The steaks were in the pan, inch–thick slabs of flesh, and I looked at them there and for the first time in my life thought about where they’d come from and what the process was that had made them available to me and my daughter and anybody else who had the $6.99 a pound to lay down at the A&P Meat Department. Cattle suffered, cattle died. And I ate burgers and steaks and roasts and never had to contemplate the face of the creature who gave it all up for me. That was the way of the world, that was progress. I shrugged, and shoved the pan under the broiler.
Sierra had retreated to her room at the end of the hall, the room that had been mine when I was a boy, and she wasn’t listening to her tapes or doodling in her notebook or whispering dire secrets into the phone – she was just lying there facedown on the bed, and her shoulders were quivering because she was crying softly into the pillow. I’d seen those quivering shoulders before, and I was powerless before them. But not this night. I had my own problems, and I didn’t take her in my arms and tell her it was all right, she could eat anything she wanted, Fruit Loops in the morning, cupcakes for lunch and Boston cream pie for dinner – no, I took her by the arm and marched her into the kitchen, where a baked potato sat slit open on the plate beside a snarl of green beans in melted butter and a slab of medium–rare steak the size of Connecticut.
I poured her a glass of milk, set my drink down and settled into my chair across the table from her. I plied knife and fork. I lifted one chunk of meat after another to my mouth, patted my lips with my napkin, vigorously tapped the inverted pepper shaker over my plate, chewed green beans, slathered my potato with sour cream and butter. There was no conversation. Nothing. I might have said, ‘Good meat,’ or something along those lines, some little dig at her, but that was about it. She never moved. She just bowed her head and stared down at her plate, the potato and beans no doubt contaminated by the juices from the steak, and the milk, which she’d never much liked but only tolerated in any case, entirely ignored. Even when I got up from the table to rinse my plate and dump the rest of my drink down the drain, she never so much as glanced up. And later, when the phone rang and rang again, her friends on the other end of the line anxious to communicate their own dire secrets, she never flinched. She sat there rigid at the table as the daylight faded from the windows, and when I found her sitting there in the dark an hour later, I flicked on the counter lights.
I couldn’t look at her face or focus too long on the back of her bowed head and the sliver of white that was the perfect parting of her hair, because I was determined not to waver. Let her get away with this and she’ll rule me, that’s the way I felt, and then it’ll be junk food and candy, then it’ll be stunted growth and rotten teeth and ruined skin, delinquency, early pregnancy, bad debts, drugs, booze, the whole downward spiral. At eleven, I crept into the kitchen and saw that she was asleep, head cradled in the nest of her hands, the plate pushed to one side, untouched, preserved like a plate under glass in some museum of Americana: Typical American meal, circa 1987. I lifted her in my arms, no weight to her at all, as if the forfeit of one night’s meal had wasted her, and laid her gendy into bed, covers to the chin, a kiss to the cheek, good night.
Pork chops the next night, breaded, with German potato salad, sauerkraut, hot apple sauce and reheated green beans. She wouldn’t even look at it. What did I say? Nothing. She sat there at the table doing her homework till she fell asleep, and this time I left her there. On the third night it was pizza, with anchovies and mushrooms, her favorite, but she wouldn’t touch that either. I gave vent to my feelings then. I roared and I threatened, slammed things
, stretched her over the rack of guilt and stretched her again – did she think it was easy for me, with no wife, to come home from a numbing day of work and put on an apron, just for her? Huh? Did she?
On the morning of the fourth day of her hunger strike, I got a call from the school nurse: she’d fainted during gym class, halfway through the rope climb, and had fallen twelve feet to the gym floor. Nothing broken, but they were taking her to the hospital for precautionary X–rays, and by the way, had she been eating right? The windows were beaded with rain. Sevry Peterson, owner of the failing stationery store in the shopping center, was sitting across the desk from me in the hopeless clutter of my office, explaining how she’d come to be six months behind in her rent. I waved her off, grabbed my jacket and made the Mustang scream all the way to the hospital.
Sierra was sitting in the waiting room when I got there, looking glum in her leggings, big socks and Reeboks and the oversized fluorescent pink T–shirt she insisted on wearing every third day. Mrs. Martini, the school nurse, was sitting on one side of her, a hugely fat man in sandals and a dirty white sweatshirt on the other. The fat man periodically dabbed his forehead with a bloody rag and moaned under his breath, and Mrs. Martini sat stiff as a cadaver over a copy of People magazine. Sierra’s eyes leapt up when she saw me come through the door, but then they went cold with the recollection that meat was murder and that I, her father, was chief among the murderers. And then what?